Women and Success Cedar Falls IA

We have bought into the idea that success is about the bottom line, financial achievement, status and winning. We have looked to our relationships, our salaries, our achievements and our possessions to define ourselves and measure our

Women and Success

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April 5th, 2010

Is the quest for success wearing you out? We women may be from Venus, but in our desire to have it all, we have been spending way too much time on Mars! We have bought into the idea that success is about the bottom line, financial achievement, status and winning. We have looked to our relationships, our salaries, our achievements and our possessions to define ourselves and measure our success.

And we have mastered "doing". We have become skilled at working full-time jobs, all the while managing our homes, our families and our primary life relationships.

But at what price? Personally, I reached the point where I had to admit that my level of doingness had evolved into full-blown workaholism and was threatening my health, my family and my sanity. I first set out to master the material world years ago when I attended a seminar called "Yes! To Success", an intense three-day program where I learned how to set goals (daily, weekly, monthly, one-year, five-year and lifetime), how to manage time and how to dress for success. I still find many of the techniques I learned then to be valuable tools for managing life today.

But somewhere along the way something shifted inside me. Going over my goals once or twice a day in the hope that I could somehow make it all happen, I began to see that activity like this was mostly about doing, often characterized as a masculine quality.

And about three years ago, the effect of this approach to living started to become clear, when I found myself frustrated and dissatisfied with the person I was becoming. Despite having done a great deal of work on myself, I was still critical, judgmental and controlling, I didn’t like my husband, and I spent a lot of time pretending that he was responsible for my unhappy state. My body hurt all the time.

Our circumstances were trying. I spent half my life (so it seemed) making the six-hour drive between two homes in the Midwest; one in Minnesota, one in Iowa. We had uprooted our comfortable, small-town living situation when the company my husband worked for moved everyone to their Minneapolis headquarters (we kept our Iowa home because it was my base of business). Just months later, my husband was laid off. But by this time, my stepson was thriving at his new high school.

Together, we decided that my husband would not look for another job, but take time to do some writing and pursue interests he had never had the time for. My income was sufficient for us to live on at the time, and I loved my speaking work, so it was not a pressure for me to support the family, in fact, I was happy to do it. Then, like so many industries and professions, the speaking field was hit hard when the events of 9/11 occurred. Slowly, what had been my primary livelihood began drying up.

What more can I do? would have been my normal response to this situation at one time. But I didn’...